I was nervous about how the answers I gave to her questions might get transformed into an article - I've never dealt with a media enquiry before - so I was relieved to see that the article that popped up just before lunchtime today was true to the answers I'd provided: Sun shines more light on Open Source Kernels.

On the registration front, people are starting to register forthe conference (cue sigh of relief) and there's still plenty of time (well, another 2 weeks) to get your seat at the early bird price. So don't be shy, decide that you really do want to meet, learn from and hang out some of the finest minds in Open Source software. You Know You Want To!

Wednesday May 06, 2009

After a lot of back-n-forth in the committee, we've finally come up with a list of presentations that we have accepted for the 16 speaking slots at Kernel Conference Australia 2009. Hopefully all the presenters will get back to me asap so I can finalise the schedule and say who they are.

Saturday May 02, 2009

We've had a great response to the CfP, and the review committee will be meeting in coming days to nut out just which presentations we'll take.

Personally, I'm very happy that given the event is new, and economies around the world are in turmoil, we've had so many presentation proposals (and of a very high quality) submitted.

The review committee will be working hard to ensure that we get the accepted papers finalised as soon as possible, but either way we've still got enough of the schedule mapped out already (keynote speakers and panels) that when registrations open on Monday you'll have a fair idea of how it'll all go.

If you are planning to register and attend, please join our Facebook Event.

Friday Mar 27, 2009

I'm really pleased to announce that the KCA2009 conference website is now active. Registrations open on 4 May 2009. The Call for Papers / (original CfP page) is still open and we're really keen to get your presentation suggestions. We're also very keen to get more sponsors on board - this isn't just a Sun event, it's an Open Source event - and Innovation Happens Everywhere(tm).

Friday Mar 06, 2009

More movement at the station when it comes to KCA2009 - we've now got a Call For Papers which I've started emailing to various people and groups.

I'm still on the hunt for sponsorship to help things along, so if your org can help, please contact me directly.

One other thing - you might look at all the details for KCA and think "but I don't use OpenSolaris why should I bother?" - to which the response is that we're interested in Open Source, which is not limited to just one kernel or company. So please, don't think KCA2009 is not for you.

Friday Feb 27, 2009

Over the years it's been a source of frustration for me that the conferences which I wanted to attend were either too expensive (time, travel, registration etc) or not covering topics I was interested in.

Late last year I realised I should stop grumbling about it and fix it myself.

So it is with great pleasure that I can announce that this July 15th to 17th in Brisbane, there will be an Open Source kernel-focused conference: Kernel Conference Australia. We don't have absolutely all of the organisational bits together yet, but here's what we do have:

Tuesday Feb 24, 2009

For a while now I've been wanting to switch from CDE to gdm as my login manager - part of the whole "getting ready for OpenSolaris" thing. When I LU'd to 106 I thought I'd give it a try, but svcadm disable cde ; svcadm enable gdm just wasn't giving me any gui lovin'.

A quick change of login theme accomplished via running /usr/sbin/gdmsetup and I'm a heckuvalot happier. Of course, I can't get a command-line login screen option any more (gdm limitation), but I think I'll live

There are pointers to two flash demos (demo #1 and Driver Workshop) as well. I saw one of the demos at last year's Beijing Tech Day, and was really impressed not only with the module and its presentation, but also with just how many of the attendees at the session really got stuck in with using it there and then.

Tuesday Dec 30, 2008

J and I have a Lexmark Optra S 1855 with mucho extra memory and a duplexer, got it from EBay in late 2003 when we needed to print out her OT honours thesis. It used to be the case that you could get a Solaris package of utilities and drivers for it from lexmark.com, but sadly the only ones available from lexmark.com these days are for their non-EOL'd printers.

I emailed Lexmark printer support asking whether I could get a copy of the old package, but the response was less than satisfactory:

Thank you for contacting Lexmark Email support. I apologize for the delay
in response.

In reply to your email, this printer Optra S 1855 is supported on Unix AIX
system. However,there are no specific x86 drivers available on Lexmark website.
The available drivers are print-drivers-aix5-sysv.pkg.Z and drivers-aix.pkg.Z.
You need to install these drivers. Alternatively, you can install a system
generic driver.

... after a request which specifically asked for the Solaris package.

So for the last few builds I've been printing to file as postscript, then dumping the .ps direct to port 9100 on the printer's IP.... slack, I know.

Since it's the slack time of the year I figured I'd have a go at seeing whether I could get the printer setup in my non-global zone using the lp family of commands. Not pretty, and in fact, rather painful to get anywhere. Following the instructions on docs.sun.com gave me this:

Stopping and re-starting print/server didn't help either, so I went looking for help. The gnome-ish stuff for OpenSolaris all talked about autodiscovery, which is great except that it requires hal to work, and we don't find hal in a non-global zone. Then I found the Presto project, which lead to Printing community and that mentioned CUPS.

By now I was just totally over it all, and I wanted it to just work, dagnabbit! so I enabled CUPS in the non-global zone, configured my printer queues there, and then ran these commands in the global zone:

Well, except for the annoying banner page, but the comments on Dan Anderson's post mentioned that you need to add -o job-sheets=none to the invocation for cupsd and that problem goes away. A quick edit of /var/svc/manifest/application/cups.xml (look for cups-lpd), then a re-import and restart of the cups services, and I'm now really happy.

Of course, I should hassle Norm for a slightly better solution than just hacking the manifest, but I'll do that later.